Their covers of Santana and Take 5 enthralled passers-by and led to invitations to perform in pubs and eventually notice from the Irish musician Damien Rice, who helped get them a manager and a record deal. They began fiddling with their own riffs, with Mr. Sánchez handling melody and Ms. Quintero taking on percussion and rhythm, often trying to copy the flamenco music she always loved but never learned to play classically.

via Rodrigo y Gabriela Return to Mexico City in Triumph – NYTimes.com.

Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was released in 1960, and Gucci, the first status label to come out of Italy, became synonymous with the hedonistic world of Rome’s café society. To enter that world, Americans needed one thing: the Gucci loafer. Growing up in Oklahoma City, Jim Gold, the president of specialty retail for the Neiman Marcus Group, thought they were the “ultimate symbol of European cool.”

By the ’70s, Gucci had three boutiques on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, where its haughty salespeople earned the ire of New York magazine, which dubbed Gucci “the rudest store in New York.” Equally irritating was Gucci’s insistence on shutting its doors between 12:30 and 1:30 p.m. “It was mystifying,” says Frasch. “All I kept thinking was, Don’t people shop on their lunch hour?”

A decade later, Gucci received its comeuppance when Aldo created a line of cheaper products, like lighters and keychains, that tarnished the brand’s image and encouraged counterfeiting. Meanwhile, Aldo’s son, Paolo, implicated him for tax evasion, and Aldo wound up in a Florida prison. With Aldo out of the way, Paolo conspired to get rid of his cousin, Maurizio, who had gained control of the company. Tired of dealing with his scheming relatives, Maurizio arranged with Andrea Morante—now CEO of Pomellato, the Italian jewelry company, but at the time at Morgan Stanley—to find an investor to buy out the rest of the family. After Bahrain-based Investcorp stepped in, Maurizio lured Bergdorf Goodman president Dawn Mello to Florence. “When I first heard, I thought, She’s going where?” says Frasch. It was not a happy marriage. Mello attempted to modernize the brand, creating the Gucci loafer in a multitude of pastels. “But whenever anything got too fashion-y,” says Richard Lambertson, the director of Tiffany’s Leather Collection, who was then Gucci’s design director, “Maurizio got very upset.”

via Gucci’s history: the story of fashion’s iconic brand – Slate Magazine.

For superstar artists, the royalty typically equals about 20%-25% of retail revenue. So in the case of iTunes’ Beatles sales, where tracks are sold to the merchant for about 90 cents and are retailed for $1.29, a standard contract with a typical superstar royalty rate of 20%-25% would pay the Beatles about 18 cents to 22.5 cents per track sale.

via Beatles iTunes Deal Pays Royalties Directly to Band, Publisher, Sources Say | Billboard.biz.

But lately there has been tumult in the Berrys’ musical kingdom. The Spice Girls helped raise EMI’s US market share from last to third out of six in 1997 and plumped Virgin’s profits, but new releases from stars such as Steve Winwood bombed. The Stones, David Bowie and Ms Jackson have undersold industry expectations, despite their multi-million-dollar advances and expensive promotions. When nominations for the Grammy Awards were counted, the Spice Girls were ignored, which doesn’t bode well for the longevity of EMI’s top-selling act.

via Ken and Nancy’s rock ‘n’ roll circus – Life & Style – The Independent.

Within four years, they’d perfected a blend of soul, New Wave, and power pop that made them the top-selling duo in the country and the uncoolest band in New York. Hall lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Sheridan Square; he’d see Lou Reed walking his dog, and went to clubs like the Mercer Arts Center and CBGB, where he saw Patti Smith, Television, and the New York Dolls—once witnessing Dolls singer David Johansen’s Mick Jagger act in an entourage that included Mick Jagger. “We loved the music, we’d hang out backstage, but we never were really part of it all,” says Hall, who nonetheless captured the chill of coke-fueled, Wall Street–Warholian nightlife in songs like 1982’s chart-topper “Maneater,” which was based on observing the scene at the West Village hot spot Marylou’s.

Around this time, Hall & Oates’s then-manager Tommy Mottola suggested the duo get involved with a new-media start-up out of Times Square. “They had these fledgling V.J.’s,” says Hall, “but they had so many hours that they’d have us on and say, ‘Just go on for three hours.’ ” The band shot their first formal music video, for “Private Eyes,” in about an hour—lip-synching in fedoras and trench coats in a West 54th Street rehearsal space—and became regulars on MTV, unwittingly sealing themselves into a moussed-up, wide-lapeled epoch that has been very hard to escape from.

The end of the Hall & Oates era came in a hotel bathroom in 1990 in Tokyo, where they had just performed at a Yoko Ono–sponsored concert commemorating the death of John Lennon. There, in a sad, reflective moment, John Oates said good-bye—to the mustache.

“It really was a kind of spiritual moment for me,” Oates says, laughing. “The mustache represented a me I no longer was. I shaved it off and never looked back.” The next day, he and Hall were waiting at the Tokyo airport for a flight back to the States when Miles Davis appeared. “He came up to me with those red eyes of his,” says Oates. “He got like three inches from my face and kinda drew his finger across his own upper lip, as if he was shaving, and he said to me [in a deep, raspy voice], ‘Now the lovin’s gonna be better.’ ” Oates pauses. “And then he went up to Daryl and said, ‘I used to tell my hairdresser, I want my hair to look just like Daryl’s.’ ”

via How Hall & Oates’s Daryl Hall Has Made a Comeback — New York Magazine.

“Craziness” and “chaos” aren’t the first words that spring to many minds at the mention of the phrase “Hall & Oates.” In fact, the duo has recently become a cultural Rorschach test. In the last five years, new media and morphing demographics have changed the longtime perception of Hall & Oates as a symbol of slick, overproduced eighties pop to, variously, great American songsmiths on a par with Lerner and Loewe, master studio craftsmen who wrought our very sonic firmament, and—to a broad and fervid demographic—the epitome of True Pop Values.

via How Hall & Oates’s Daryl Hall Has Made a Comeback — New York Magazine.

The first and only music term in the top 100 is Eminem at No. 47. The absence of music titles from the list does not necessarily mean music was not a sought-after product. One factor is the relatively small number of movies released in a given year. Only 677 U.S. films were produced in 2009, according to the MPAA, while around 100,000 unique albums were released in the U.S. that year. As a result, demand for an average movie title is likely to be greater than demand for any one music title.

via Business Matters: Live365 Will Survive Webcasting Royalty Rates But May Appeal Ruling | Billboard.biz.

…AND THE WORST

Megadeals Record companies, like their movie-studio brethren, have been signing superstars to pacts worth tens of millions of dollars only to see the resultant product–George Michael’s recent album, say, or R.E.M.’s–stiff in the marketplace. Hmmm, is there a correlation between ill-advised deals and rising CD prices?

via DECEMBER 23, 1996 VOL. 148 NO. 28.

I agree with the conclusion but I am not sure that globalization was the mechanism. I sometimes think of an imaginary economy with two sectors: music and bathtubs. I believe that my bathtub is over thirty years old, yet for me it works fine and I have no desire to buy a new one. When it comes to music, most people want to listen to what is new and hot, not Bach’s B Minor Mass. Furthermore, even within the music sector, acts seem to have declining longevity, in part due to the decline of the iconic album, the rise of the iTunes single, the fall of entry barriers, and the proliferation of genres. The Rolling Stones are still around, or U2, but more rapid turnover is the trend.

A while ago I read a good article about how few people on Netflix rent or stream the indie movies from the 1980s or 90s.

via Marginal Revolution: Has knowledge capital been depreciating more rapidly?.

Thus, in 1995, Branca pulled off another coup: Sony/ATV Music Publishing. Jackson owned half of a much larger company, and pocketed a $150-million check from Sony. If Branca were entitled to 5 percent, his take totaled $7.5 million.

Sony/ATV’s repository of 750,000 songs, from Elvis Presley to Eminem to Bob Dylan, is the smallest of the four major publishers, behind EMI Music, Universal Music Group and Warner’s Music/Chappell.

Estimates of its value range from $1.6 to $2 billion, and in recent years it generated operating cash of $100 million to $130 million a year, according to the New York Times.The publishing income alone, which Sony and the Jackson estate divvy up, should acount for tens of millions a year in estate income — as it used to for Jackson.

via Fired, the Superlawyer Returns to Bail Jackson Out — for a Price | TheWrap.com.